Goh, Gwang-Yoon. 2011. The Reference Corpus and the Composition of Keyword Results. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 11-3, 787-810. Keyword calculation for a text in corpus linguistics is usually made through the comparison of the word list of the text with the word list of a reference corpus (RC). For this very reason, its results are highly likely to be influenced by one's choice of the RC, thereby making it worthwhile to examine the relationship between the RC and resulting keyword results. This paper is a quantitative study of the effects that the size and composition of the RC can have on the results of keyword calculation and it investigates how different factors of the RC composition affect the composition of the keyword list, an issue that has never been properly addressed in the literature. Most importantly, it is shown that varying corpus size and genre, among the four major factors contributing to the composition of the RC, can bring about statistically significant differences in the composition of the keyword results produced, whereas the effects of other factors such as diachrony and varietal difference are statistically not significant and can be largely ignored. The results of this study suggest that the keyword results of a text, whose composition can significantly vary depending on the RC used, need to be interpreted and applied with the possible diversity of the aboutness that they indicate in mind.